Former Nuclear Regulatory Commission security specialist Daryl Johnson said in an August 25 NewsNation interview that the agency recorded nearly 300 drone and UAP flyovers over the U.S. commercial reactor fleet between 2014 and 2025. Johnson, who said he coordinated the NRC program tracking those incidents, has published his account in the book Unguarded Skies.
The total is Johnson's characterization of the program record, not a count of extraterrestrial craft. The reports covered objects described as drones as well as incidents whose operator or exact identity was not established. Johnson said fewer than one percent were attributed to an operator, a claim that should be read as an assessment of attribution performance rather than evidence that the remainder was anomalous technology.
Public NRC correspondence illustrates the operational problem. Records concerning a 2022 incident at the Susquehanna plant describe several small quadcopters and a larger triangular object with a light over the protected area. The written record and Johnson's later recollection differ on some details, so the contemporaneous documents remain the firmer source for the sequence.
The policy issue is airspace awareness and response authority. AARO's fiscal 2025 report separately said it received 50 reports near nuclear infrastructure and that all were reported as unmanned aircraft systems, not UAP. Johnson's interview adds testimony about the NRC's historical monitoring gaps, but it does not resolve who operated the aircraft or establish a non-human origin.